Anne, Catherine, Dave… you should probably skip this one.

Just got out of therapy. Some important stuff came up.

I think that my siblings and I are very much products of how our mother raised us, and as a result we are all very bright…. but we don’t know how to express emotion.

We could only express ourselves intellectually. And no big surprise, we all ended up struggling with depression and/or anxiety. Deep down, we all knew that expressing negative emotions would upset our mother, and because she raised us, it would upset the other siblings too. We had one primary example of expression unbridled emotion in our household, and that was Dad.

And he was a heck of a counterexample.

Contrasted to that was our very sweet mother who stimulated our minds marvelously, and of course, we wanted to please her, so we became her students. Her eager, shining students.

But I am pretty sure your mother is supposed to be more than a teacher to her kids.

And then there’s the fact that we all instinctively protect her. That’s the deep and unquestionable rule of the Bertrand kids. We all protect Mom without question or hesitation. My mother is shy and sensitive (like me) and so we all protect her from the harshness of the world because we love her. Even as I type this, the very thought of doing anything that might hurt or upset her makes me feel like I want to faint. That is something you simply Do Not Do.

But who do you go to when you are hurt when you can’t bring that to your mother for fear of hurting her? Being strong for your kids is part of parenting. Giving them a safe place where they can be vulnerable, where they can get their boo-boos kissed and their egos soothed is a vital part of parenting, and I don’t think any of us got that from either parent.

At least, not past a certain point. Possibly the point where Mom went back to work, I don’t know. I can remember my mom being there when I hurt myself when I was a wee little preschooler. I was a clumsy little thing with poor vision and an excess of enthusiasm… a deadly combo. And I remember running to her with my cuts and bruises,and getting comfort and nurturing then.

But at some point, that changed. She was simply not there for me. The others are older than me, and so maybe they got their nurturing (and guidance, and scolding) before she became emotionally drained, but at some point, the light went off, and I didn’t know how to find my way home any more.

I guess it takes a lot of things going your way for you to end up any mentally healthier than your parents.

And I was not equipped to make friends. So much of my life’s problems begin with that. I never learned to truly get along with others. I never learned to fit in. I never got the proper socialization. Where would I have gotten in? I had no friends at school or at home. My siblings and I were in different universes. At no point did I have a chance to learn proper social integration at a level larger than a family.

As a result, I was socially isolated. Granted, my intelligence played a part in that too. I wasn’t exactly into what the other kids my age were doing. I was a very strange child.

But I think if I had gone to kindergarten, I might have had a chance of learning to get along somehow anyway. I would at least learned than changing yourself to fit in with the group is not the world thing in the world. There is more to life than integrity.

And that is another thing therapy got me thinking about : integrity. What is integrity, anyhow? I think a workable definition of integrity would be that it is the internal strength and cohesion of one’s psyche. We maintain our integrity because we don’t want to weaken that structure. We don’t want that kind of pain.

Now for people with a normal level of social integration, a lot of that structural integrity comes from the social fabric in which they live. From the outside, this seems like maybe a bad idea, but they are the ones with healthy fulfilling lives, so it must work for the vast majority of humanity.

But if you are outside the social fabric, socially isolated, that’s not an option. Integrity is all you have. So you end up very heavily invested in your personal integrity and unwilling to compromise it for any reason, no matter what.

You might even end up feeling like you’re barely keeping your guts in with both hands.

That’s why people like me end up in such a bad state, and why we are so unwilling to let our identities become subsumed in a larger one.

To us, that is death, or damn close to it. it requires a level of trust that is hard to calculate. You’d have to trust that if you let go of some of that personal integrity, the mysterious and frightening force that keeps social integration going will pick up the slack and keep your insides inside.

That is why, I think, a lot of nerds become incredibly invested in a particular nerdly subculture. That subculture is the very first place where they feel that sense of security that comes from being part of a social group, and that is like ice cold water for someone wandering in the desert of social isolation.

So they, in their various ways, worship their social savior. Maybe that worship fastens itself to a figurehead, like George Lucas, Joss Whedon, or Gene Roddenberry. But make no mistake, what is truly being worshiped is the thing which pierced their social isolation and brought light and warmth to their lives.

Myself…. I am still looking.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.